Hammer Mill Days

Sweepin' up after that big storm. Man, the weather these days. Good goddamn thing that global warming story turned out to be a hoax. If it'd been true, we'd be worried about all this extreme weather. But no, no.... everything's fine. Experts agree. No, today's not contrary Wednesday. It's contrary every freaking day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. I'm spouting that stuff about global warming in hopes of ingratiating ourselves to a potential corporate sponsor. Who, you may ask? Well, it's someone Big Green worked with before - Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., king of the extractive industries. Tearing Earth a new Asshole since 1953 ™. From the tar sands of Alberta to the gold mines of Irian Jaya to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania, the name Hegemonic has been synonymous with ... well, with making big piles of money out of big piles of slag. Who better to shake down for some cash, right? Oh, yes... I know what you...

Another Memorial Day come and gone. PBS played the annual extravaganza in Washington D.C., replete with stars of stage, screen, and studio, in some respects bizarre beyond description. It always strikes me as odd that a day reserved to commemorate the dead from this nation's wars should carry such hyper-patriotic overtones. As I watch, I keep wanting to say, "Take it down a notch - that's the kind of talk that got them all killed." It's long been my contention that the very ostentatious hero-ization of our active military and veterans is, at its heart, an effort to make our pointless wars seem somehow noble and just. The laptop bombardiers crowing "hero!" most loudly are the ones who gladly see their heroes shipped off for a fifth tour of duty. Doesn't bear close inspection. Perhaps even stranger is the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the American war in Vietnam - like that was something to celebrate. Obama spoke to this poi...

No, no. Good monster. You don't want to kill your benefactor, do you? Here ... have some more porridge, there's a good chap. (Hoo boy.) Oh, hi. Yep, that's right; I'm in the process of talking down one of Mitch Macaphee's greatest creations (at least in his own estimation). Yes, it seems that Freakenstein, once set loose by Dr. Macaphee, did a tear around the neighborhood, pulling up lamp posts, opening fire hydrants, and generally making a nuisance of himself. He went into the local pawn shop and got a few items out of hock - items he, of course, had no personal connection with (since he was only just invented and has never known the joys of personal property) but nonetheless liked anyway. What did he use for money? No cash needed ... when you're Freakenstein. Okay, so ... predictably, the complaints start rolling in from all over town. And it's clear that we need to do something about this. It was a bit like when Big Zamboola first got here and started...

This is going to be brief. My back is a disaster area today, and that's no Jonathan Harris imitation. I was listening to President Obama speaking at the NATO summit this past week, talking about ending the Afghan War "responsibly". And I had this impulse to say, "Thanks, Nixon!" Back in the day, old Dick was winding down his war, so to speak, standing up a colonial army (the ARVN - south Vietnamese army) and always talking about "peace with honor" after nearly a decade of mindless slaughter. They were fighting "terrorists" as well - just look at Life magazine or some other news publication from the late 1960s and you'll see that that was one of the terms they used to describe the Viet Cong (NLF). Not so different. Except that it was actually more brutal, as brutal and ugly as the Afghan war has been and continues to be. Vietnam and more generally Indochina was almost totally destroyed during the American war there, particularly from ...

I know. I shouldn't have interrupted him with my petty complaints. He's a mad scientist, not a T.V. and stereo repair man. My bad, totally. Dude. Oh, yes... that's right. We are not the only ones reading this. Sorry out there in the blogosphere. Big Green is in the midst of a band meeting of sorts. No, we don't typically do these. Like most groups, we all live together in our funky (i.e. "groovy") musician bachelor pad, with the retro sixties modular furniture and gooseneck lamps of the type you might find in Darrin Stevens' house (assuming he actually had a house and not just a set that is, in essence, a house sawed in half). My point is.... um ... (yes... it was a house sawed in half, perhaps by some kind of witchcraft, or ... craft services....) Damn it! Okay, I'll stay on point. We're meeting about that thing, that bloodthirsty killer. No, not "The Thing", as in the sci-fi movie "The Thing". I mean the thing that Mitc...

The Bush administration is over (for the most part), right? Well, not so fast. Yes, they started two disastrous wars, killing enough people to make Milosevic and Suharto blush. Yes, they shook the empire to its foundations, so much so that they spent the last two years of their tenure under the watchful eye of an imperial overseer (Robert Gates). Yes, their ludicrously ham-fisted foreign policy - coupled with monumental domestic blunders - resulted in the near-total collapse of the American economy, bringing on the first proper depression since the 1930s. But none of that means they shouldn't be put back in charge again, right? I think I felt the earth tremble just then. Yeah, nobody wants that ... really. And yet there is a very real possibility that many of the same people who ran Bush's foreign policy - including the most extreme of the neoconservative cadre - could have their sweaty, blood-stained hands back on the levers of imperial power this coming January. The cabal a...

Blowout. Another switch gone. Our gear is in the toilet, my friend. Aging, threadbare ... disgusting. Oh, well. Yep, we've got technical difficulties. Nothing new. Last week it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that went on the blink. No, I mean literally - he wouldn't stop blinking. I think it's all that time he spent taking phone calls when our voicemail broke down. Poor tin bastard. Then there goes another diode, and here we are on a tight budget, just like the rest of America. (Even Mitch, his creator, is too busy to tend to him.) Mother of pearl. Still, I suppose we can do without a power amp. We can just pretend we have active speakers instead of passive, and the power of imagination will carry the day. As it always does. The end. Right, well.... we're not typically given to wishful thinking here at Big Green . No, we are practical mofo's, not those flighty kinda imagineering mofo's you read about in the Sunday paper. Fact is, we're recordin...